Posted on 12/29/2003 7:24:23 PM PST by dennisw
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK Lenny Bruce, Pardoned and Laughing By BRUCE WEBER
f he were still alive, chances are that Lenny Bruce, officially pardoned last week by Gov. George E. Pataki for cursing in public 39 years ago, would have found the whole routine hilarious.
For him, anything official was at least suspect, if not inevitably self-incriminating; dogma of any kind was anathema, and icons — from presidents to popes, from mob bosses to beloved mothers — cried out to be reduced to human size.
Bruce certainly wouldn't have needed the governor to declare what he always knew to be true: that his words were not only legal but also well within the embrace of the American spirit. That it took the government so long to figure it out would only have reinforced his conviction that officialdom is willfully perverse, innately illogical and slow, if not plain stupid.
Even so, it's probably true that we overpraise Bruce. A drug addict with the obsessive self-regard of the righteous in defense of a cause, he was hardly a saint. His death, of a drug overdose in 1966, was squalid.
He was a terrific comedian, an important social critic because he made his criticisms aloud. But to make him into a martyr for free speech is dubious. He only went to jail, briefly; he wasn't burned at the stake.
And what, ultimately, did he accomplish? It's a shame, of course, but influential people can't choose whom they influence; the untalented can be affected as easily as the talented, maybe more easily. Bruce paved the way for the unrestrained stage vocabularies of George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Chris Rock, sure. But isn't Howard Stern his legacy, too?
He set us on a slippery slope. It's true you can't read transcripts of a lot of his work in The New York Times. But turn on cable television and at just about any given moment most of the verbal taboos that Bruce railed against are being violated. Those adorable kids on "South Park" have filthier potty mouths than Bruce ever did. Cross the obscenities out of a script from "The Sopranos" and it would look like the publicly released version of a secret F.B.I. file. Even Bruce wouldn't try to make comedy out of the taste of ejaculate, as the women on "Sex and the City" have done.
Bruce has been given credit for coining the phrase "T and A," but it's unlikely he envisioned the day when you could see both of those body parts, unabbreviated, in prime time. Or hear about pubic hair during the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. And about Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Starr? Do you really think that's a proper way for a lawyer to express himself?
In retrospect, the language Bruce was arrested for using on stage at the Cafe au Go Go (multisyllabic words for an incestuous son and a practitioner of oral sex, for example) seems, if not tame, then unextraordinary. What the words no longer carry with them is an attitude of any importance. Bruce's speech was defiant, a claim that Chris Rock or Tony Soprano could no longer make.
In fact, from our vantage point, Bruce's crime can be seen for what it was: not indecency, but gall. At a time when a sitcom married couple like Rob and Laura Petrie (characters on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" played by Mr. Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, for you youngsters) had to sleep in well-separated twin beds, Bruce refused to stand on prim convention, and again and again he proved on stage that to do otherwise would be hypocritical.
What fueled his comedy was outrage, and his real concerns made the issue of obscenity as preposterous and irrelevant as it has turned out to be.
In particular, Bruce was vehement and scabrous on the issue of racial equality; he was undaunted by the coarsest epithets for blacks and Jews and used them purposely, repeatedly, in order to insist that they are merely words and to reduce their divisive impact.
Some of his routines on this subject are even more shocking now than they were 40 years ago. Sensitivities being what they are, no contemporary comic would dare do now what Bruce did then.
Which is why he would find it ludicrous to be pardoned by a politician for using obscenities. It's beside the point.
They criticize some straw-man, dogmatic, BarbraStreisand and the NYT'ers themselves are the epitome of the commissars they claim to be saving the world from.
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